Here is the deal. I am on Facebook. I am on Orkut. And thought I am inactive, if you search, you might just find me on HI5 and godknowswhereallelse.
Networking sites.
A great way to stay in the loop, figure out whats happening with my friends (most of them have moved out of the city/country), and maybe even get some office goss. Who knows, I might even land a job one day through the wonder of social networking. Who knows?
Uptil now, I am proud to say I have had the sense to ignore the creepy 'frandsip' requests. I would not get alone into an auto at 1 am in delhi. Similarly.
That said, for those in the dark, here is was in the news a few days back:
New Delhi: Adnan Patrawala the 16-year-old son, of a businessman, who was abducted on Saturday night, was found dead in Navi Mumbai on Monday.
Police investigations suggest that the plan to kidnap Adnan was hatched on Orkut, a social networking website.
While the police have arrested three of Adnan's friends - Sujith Nair (28), Ayush Bhat (19) and Himmesh Ambavat (18) – for murdering him, an Orkut profile under the name of Angel D in under police scanner.
Police sources say the trio, whom Adnan had met through Orkut, had promised to introduce him to Angel. But the question is who is Angel? As the hundreds of messages on Adnan's scrapbook suggest, Angel's profile could well be fake.
Wait a minute.WHAT??? Murder???? Its tragic, its insane, and frankly, its stupid. How dumb can you be, meeting people who befriended u on orkut??? But the fact is, people out there are not just meeting, they are dating and even -and this is a fact - getting married to people they met on Orkut. Huh? Did i miss something?
And all this while, far from here, somewhere in the 'land of the free', someone named Charlie was equally addicted. The man got a warning from boss as he was spending more than 4 HOURS each day logged on to Facebook. 4 whole hours. A day. His instantanious reaction? Logging on and posting the following :"I'd rather loose my job than my Facebook account."
When did we cross that line? When did our self worth diminish to the point we felt the need to measure it in orkut scraps and facebook pokes? What drove us to lay open our lives, sexual preferences, relationship status open for all the freaks in the Whole Wide World? When did our search for love/sex/'friendship' overcome our bloody common sense? When did we turn into unidimensinal words on some arbit web page?
I know there are creeps out there who check out the world's scrapbooks, maybe they get a vouyeristic thrill. The thing is, they end up getting a pretty accurate picture of this person's life. From who he/she is dating, what they did on their birthday, to occassional phone numbers and even addresses.
Suddenly, thats scary.
I checked out the hottie from work on orkut today. Wonder who checked me out.
